Research News

Dr. Emilia Entcheva (Biomedical Engineering): Testing for the cardiac side effects of anti-cancer drugs is essential, but it is a lengthy and expensive process, and pharmaceutical companies are eager to ﬁnd ways to speed it up and reduce costs. This is where the pioneering work of Dr. Emilia Entcheva may prove very helpful.

Dr. Danmeng Shuai (Civil & Environmental Engineering): Environmental engineers like Dr. Danmeng Shuai are hard at work seeking new methods to treat water to remove a new class of contaminants called emerging contaminants.

Dr. Robert Pless (Computer Science): Cameras have become ubiquitous. Security cameras increasingly dot our landscapes, and smart phones mean that most of us have a camera at the ready at all times. Dr. Robert Pless foresees the myriad beneﬁcial applications of the images these cameras capture, and he is capitalizing on them to help address national needs and social justice issues.

Dr. Roger Lang (Electrical & Computer Engineering): For 10 years Dr. Roger Lang has worked with NASA and its microwave satellite instrument Aquarius to measure the surface salinity of the ocean. The bottom line of this is for NASA to understand the effects of climate change.

Dr. Erica Gralla (Engineering Management & Systems Engineering): Dr. Erica Gralla knows that better models of decision making can dramatically improve system performance and outcomes, so she works to develop models to better reﬂect the structures and context of various systems in which decisions are made. One system she studies is disaster response supply chains.

Department of Biomedical Engineering: In April, USA Today featured Dr. Park in its pages, highlighting his work to program robots that can communicate with children with autism. His goal is to help autistic children learn to become more comfortable interacting with other children and adults.

Dr. Rumana Riffat (Civil & Environmental Engineering): As rising energy costs drive up the cost of wastewater treatment, treatment plants are looking to find new ways to lower the energy use associated with wastewater treatment, and to re-use the by-products of the treated water. One of the people they are consulting is Dr. Rumana Riffat.

Dr. Tim Wood (Computer Science): Dr. Tim Wood helps create the infrastructure inside computers that is necessary to help run the “big data,” or data-intensive, operations that we all hear so much about these days. He is finding ways to make that infrastructure more reliable, more efficient, and more secure.

Dr. Taeyoung Lee (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering): Dr. Taeyoung Lee conducts research in dynamics and controls. One of his current research projects—transporting a payload by several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—has both military and commercial applications.